Editorial

Letter from the Editor

I recall working for a search engine back in the early days of Internet search, before search was even an engine and was more like a giant index that people assembled manually by surfing around and checking out sites. I don’t remember so much politics back then – not like now, where every extremest has a blog. Back then, you had to be at least a little bit of a techie even to have a website – or to even know about the web, for that matter. I remember running across lots of entrepreneurs with quirky, interesting products they seemed to have developed on their own. I emerged from that era with a new-found appreciation for how fuzzy the line is between what is patentable and what isn’t. Along with these interesting, quirky products were some very abstract and conceptual ”good ideas” or, in some cases, pretty ordinary ideas that someone out there was pretty sure he had invented.

Buy this article as PDF

Express-Checkout as PDF

Price $2.95(incl. VAT)

Buy Linux Magazine

Related content

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has come to a decision that could be crucial for standards and Open Source software in proposing a consent agreement in a patenting claim, says Andy Updegrove, the Linux Foundation's (LF) legal expert.

The U.S. is known for its patent friendliness. But a Supreme Court decision in 2008 overturned a patent application by Bernard L. Bilski and Rand A. Warsaw for a risk mitigation process. Now Red Hat is using the so-called Bilski case in support of software non-patentability.